From Christ to Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the Church in Less Than a Century
Overview
How did the movement founded by Jesus transform more in the first seventy-five years after his death than it has in the two thousand years since?
From Christ to Christianity offers an informative and understandable summary of the development of Christianity in the New Testament and post-Apostolic eras. James Edwards tells the story of how the Christian movement—which began as relatively informal, rural, Hebrew and Aramaic speaking, and closely anchored to the Jewish synagogue—became primarily urban, Greek speaking, and gentile within the first Christian generation, spreading through the Greco-Roman world with a mission agenda and church organization distinct from its roots in Jewish Galilee.
This book not only demonstrates how, by the early second century, the church attained the characteristic qualities to become the Christian church as we generally know it today but also shows how the witness of the early church can encourage today's church. It also includes several maps.
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- Offers an informative and understandable summary of the development of Christianity in the New Testament
- Demonstrates how the church attained the characteristic qualities to become the Christian church
- Explores how the Christian movement became primarily urban
- Introduction: Two Profiles of One Reality
- From Rural to Urban
- From Jerusalem to Rome
- From Jerusalem to the East and South
- From Hebrew to Greek
- From Jesus Movement to Gentile Mission
- From Jesus Movement to Roman Persecution
- From Torah to Kerygma
- From Synagogue to Church
- From Jewish to Christian Ethos
- From Passover to Eucharist
- From Apostles to Bishops
- From Sabbath to Sunday
- From “Way” to Christian
- From Scroll to Codex
- Conclusion: New Wine in New Wineskins
Top Highlights
“A second and even greater fact of first-century Christianity was the constancy of the inner core of the Jesus movement amid drastic external changes in the church. The summary changes in the forms of the Jesus movement from Jesus to Ignatius did not alter the content of the movement, which remained rooted in, continuous with, and faithful to the character and ministry of Jesus. This unchanging constant was the DNA of Christianity through its changing forms of life.” (Page xxvi)
“The Christian concept of conversion to one true faith was, with the exception of Judaism, novel in ancient religions. The ancients tended to be syncretistic in their religious allegiances.” (Page 14)
“The Christian faith imposed fewer conditions on would-be recipients than did other cults, but the conditions it required were more life changing.39 Christianity introduced the concept of humanity reconstituted in ‘the image of God’ as manifested in Jesus Christ. This was accomplished by conversion rather than by external observances, and the concept of conversion was utterly new in the Roman understanding of religion.40 Christianity called people to leave old loyalties behind and turn to something new—a transforming faith, a transforming community of believers, and the ethics of a transformed life.” (Page 14)
“The New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers thus determine the primary scope of our study—namely, the roughly one-hundred-year period between the writing of the first document in the New Testament (probably Galatians, in the late 40s) and the close of the era of the Apostolic Fathers (around 150).” (Page xxviii)
- Title: From Christ to Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the Church in Less than a Century
- Author: James R. Edwards
- Publisher: Baker Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2021
- Logos Release Date: 2021
- Pages: 290
- Era: era:contemporary
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- Subject: Church history › Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600
- ISBNs: 9781493429219, 9781540961402, 9781540964106, 9781493420216, 1493429213, 1540961400, 1540964108, 1493420216
- Resource ID: LLS:CHRSTCHRSTCNTRY
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-29T22:40:07Z
Reviews
0 ratings
Marco Ceccarelli
9/6/2021
I've read about half of the book. I'm interested into it and I'll finish it. But I can already say that, although I find the author good and interesting, he often reports news in a clumsy and inaccurate way as well as without the support of appropriate bibliographical references (which in books of this kind is certainly not an irrelevant thing). The list of inaccuracies is too long to be reported. I point out only the following: - Origen, who was himself martyred by the Romans - Irenaeus wrote Adversus Haereses in AD 150 - The "seven deacons" of Acts 6 - Peter (whose influence in early Jewish Christianity was second only to James)
